Since its beginning in the late 60’s, the Internet has grown. It includes many applications such as file transfer, electronic mail and terminal access.
TCP/IP Protocol suite matured in an environment nurtured by academic research and government support. When it starts, only a few team adopted the protocols and connected their network together.
TCP/IP shows its capabilities, thus more and more organisations have plugged their network into the world’s largest and fastest growing network : the Internet. Today, Internet is the amount of thousands of networks and it reaches dozens of country.

Many new applications and utilities have been developed by many managers and users of the Internet. Also, a lot of people started to depend on the Internet in their usual work. The need of a merging for all the management protocols became urgent in order to have an assurance of availability, satisfactory performance and rapid solutions to the problems.

As TCP/IP became widely used in private commercial enterprise network, it requires more features. Commercial enterprise can’t afford to have long network outages and long host downtimes. They are also concerned by the security and the confidentiality. So the Internet community has to responded to these demands.

A common network management toolset was required for the TCP/IP and the Internet. The starting point was then given by the IAB and his RFC 1052 in 1988.

---